Image Maps, FeeXWire, Vivesa Oh MY!!!!

A few days ago my friend Joe asked me if I could snap a few head shots for his resume.  He's a tech guy like me so he tends to be behind the camera and not in front of it very often.  Yesterday Joe and I meet up at the Local Seminary and ran around campus trying to dodge the rain and keep the shoot-through umbrella in one piece (it was so windy ... I think my umbrella is like 75% broken, good thing it is not very expensive!).  This morning I sat down to do a bit of editing on one of the photos to see what I could do while maintaining the integrity of the photo.  Take a look at the spit below

I really flexed my retouching muscles with a "get rid of stubble technique" I learned over at Kelby Training this week.  The first thing I did was create the image map you see at the top of the post.  Then, I whitened the teeth using the technique I covered yesterday in the video tutorial.  I removed some random specs on the skin and his suit with spot healing brush and the clone stamp tool.  The biggest manipulation is on the right side on his Shoulder - I used Liquify to smooth out the kink in the suit (I'll be covering that in depth next week on Monday's tutorial).  Based on several recommendations I gave Nik Software's Vivesa Photoshop plug-in a try and WOW.  I used it to warm up the face and darken the background... in about 2 seconds.  Instant soup.  The final touch was David's Ziser's beauty blur with an image mask to retain the sharpness of the facial features.  Anyways - below are larger versions of the before and after.